Will AI take your job?

Ireland has been driven out of the low cost labour market, those jobs have not been eliminated, they've gone abroad. Agriculture has become mostly mechanized and automated, you don't see the neighbours coming in twice a day to hand milk cows, one time there were a lot of computer components and systems assembled in Ireland, the screwdriver jobs have moved to lower cost countries (not just wages, combined transport and energy costs - e.g. Computer giant Dell moved assembly from Limerick to Poland). Even McDonalds have put up kiosks to take orders. Unions have mostly disappeared from low skilled occupations, their declining membership in that sector speaks volumes, if workers were getting value for money more would be paying union dues. These days unions follow the money and mostly represent professional services, they advantage those already advantaged.

Unions have pushed for and gotten laws to mandate wage levels and working hours, businesses have responded where they can with more automation, moving abroad or closing. When they have try those mandates in countries with no social safety net they get absolute poverty in return. As an example in Bangladesh back in the early '90s, they passed laws against child labour in the sweatshops. ~50,000 children were kicked out of employment into worse conditions like prostitution or breaking stones, despite the well meaning intentions of the people who pushed for and got the laws, the children were helping support their families.

We live in a country where religious indoctrination takes place daily in 95% of primary classrooms, and primary kids spend more time on religion than on science and PE combined. 10% of class time in primary is religion.

So not as much in a position to point fingers as we think.

If big labour want to claim that as positive, why won't they claim responsibility for negative consequences?, they don't dare discuss that. Nothing we do happens in a vacuum. The argument for advancement of AI is based on claims it improves worker productivity, the fear that currently employed humans will no longer be needed, activists are playing on that fear in their push for universal basic income.

The simplistic view of productivity for argument sake is total output / worker hours. Where a worker using manual process can produce 5 widgets an hour that can be sold at a rate higher than it cost to make them + taxes. Ultimately whoever buys the widgets must be willing to pay that amount, that is market price. You can mandate the wages levels and working hours all you want, if the company can't produce and sell at market price, the entrepreneurs job is to figure out how to make that happen.

If said worker operates a machine that produces 500 widgets an hour, such that it lowers the cost of production, more is produced, can be sold at market price earning more profits, enter greedy unions (its not just greedy capitalists), unions are paid to represent they members interests, they can argue each worker is more productive and deserves more pay, after lots of back and forth, they can claim success (and more union dues) because the product can be sold profitably at market price. Everyone is a winner. Their claims rest on calculations of worker productivity and market price.

The function of living minimum wage rates is to allow union negotiators bypass wage settlements based on discussions of productivity and market price loosely described above. Ironically, the higher they push these mandated rates the more interesting AI becomes to entrepreneurs as a potential solution. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

What did you mean by this line "The code is better but I have to micromanage a bit more."? Is the AI code better? I heard it was often buggy. Also are you micromanaging the AI? Confused.

Sound thanks.

Spare the class warfare, the us versus them mentality. I know how unions work having personally run foul of them twice and nearly getting fired in one incident due to their attempts at strong arming management. Neither branch I worked is in business, both were closed in the late 90s/early 2000s, both involved in building products, could not make money during the early part of the boom. The union employees sabotaged operations by routinely breaking machinery. Employers in question learned their lesson, shutdown operations, opened elsewhere, hired workers from Poland and were one of the few suppliers to survive the bust intact. That in a nutshell is why many unions failed, they wanted to eliminate competition, monopolise labour, maintain outdated work practices, collect fees and coerce employers into paying them more for less. Then they act surprised when employers figured out how to bypass their tactics and get stuff done without them. Speaking to one of my union member friends recently, they look at the union newsletters and ask themselves what are they paying union dues for? There is nothing in the newsletter that represents the paying members interests, just lots of irrelevant campaigning (to them) on the politics of woke. Unions may want to pay more attention to their paying members actual interests.

Personally, I'm patiently waiting for AI to take my job. 15 years in a MNC, I want my payout so I can ride off into the sunset (albeit temporarily).

In the meantime, I'm applying AI in most aspects of my work. Accurate prompting and having sense of what AI tools to use for what use case is important, but not difficult.

The power imbalance between employer and employee is still there, and always will be. We can counteract it to some extent with decent employment rights law - that is a concept several US employers based here are still trying and failing to grasp…